A RELIGIOUS MAN 279
what not/ Shaw's point is that there is not room in our
minds for all the old pictures of God if we persist in looking
on them as pictures of the living God. They are nothing
of the kind, he insists, all but one being pictures of dead
gods; not false gods, but Has Beens. The picture of the
living God is the latest picture which we can appreciate and
understand. The rest we must either sweep away; or, if
we keep them, we must look on them as nothing more than
legends, or pictures in a gallery of ancestral mythology, or
interesting records, or historical relics, and put them into a
museum of evolutionary exhibits*
Bernard Shaw pretends not to be certain of the meaning
of his tale of the Black Girl. Its moral, however, seems
clear. It is surely that we should take a lesson from the
bees and the clover. When a bee lights on a blossom he
finds it divided into many dozens of smaller flowers, or
florets; and as he drains a floret of its honey, so he in-
variably turns it down, thus indicating for the benefit of
all other visiting bees that all the downward pointing florets,
once useful and honeyed, are now empty, finished, done with,
and as good as dead. What the bee does instinctively with
the clover's florets Shaw would have us do deliberately
with our beliefs. Putting the matter colloquially, he
warns us to throw out our dirty water before we take
in fresh.
The difficulty of worshipping anything so apparently
fumbling and dumb, so blind and stupid as the Life Force,
and of retaining our self-respect while paying it allegiance,
is mitigated when we remember two axioms: first, that
man always makes God in his own image, so that the cap
fits, for man too is fumbling and stupid; and second, that
in every religion what man worships is not God, but only
such revelation of Him as is suited to man's earthly plane.
Sensing this kind of difficulty, Shaw refrains from omni-
science and offers his creed as 'nothing more than another
provisional hypothesis/ All provisional hypotheses may
be illusions, he adds, 'but if they conduce to beneficial
conduct they must be inculcated and acted on by govern-
ments until better ones arrive/ So long as Shaw is reason-
ably satisfied that he has got hold of the right end of the